Have You Ever Seen The Rain

Yesterday and days before
Sun is cold and rain is hard
I know
Its been that way for all my time
Till forever on it goes
Through the circle fast and slow
I know
And it can't stop I wonder

I wanna know
Have you ever seen the rain
Coming down on a sunny day

Rain… isn’t it meant to bring people down… How come I feel so good when it rains… Is that not normal… Does it have something to do with what my name means… I love the sun and everything about it but a rainy day is always a special day… everything always seems more fun in the rain… when I was very young, it meant the lawn would get flooded and my father and I would make paper boats and sail them in our makeshift lake… the boats never lasted long but I have never forgotten them… and going to school on a rainy day and playing in all the puddles… there was no thought given to the diseases we might’ve caught from doing that… that was the all part of the joy of being a child… and I’d go home and get on my bicycle and do it all over again on the streets of Annanagar…

I didn’t outgrow my love of the rain even after I outgrew puddles… I still enjoyed walking outside my house under my umbrella and I can still remember the concern of my poor dogs as I did that… they hated the thought of getting wet themselves but they were still kinda worried to let me go out into the garden by myself what with all the thunder and the lightening so they’d follow me into the rain and whine worriedly until I went back in… that’s loyalty for you…

And then there were those rainy days when we’d have to hotbox the car because we didn’t want to stand outside and get wet… and wasn’t it just the most awesome fun to go swimming in the rain... And there were those nights where we’d hide out in someone’s apartment car park and drink ourselves silly… or we’d sit in the gazebo and watch the rain falling in the pool… and then there was R’s backyard and all those beach house parties that got washed out but were still fun somehow… and who can forget the EC-41 rain dances… sometimes it was real rain and sometimes it wasn’t, but it was always fun…

And is there anything quite like waking up on a Sunday morning with nothing to do and hearing the rain pattering on the window sill outside and all you want to do is pick up your book from last night and curl up under your quilt again and get lost in someone else’s life… and you could do just that because life was easy and if you didn’t want to get out of bed you didn’t have to…

Ah rain… what a wonderful smell it has.

I guess you don’t always remember the fun you had on days on which the sun shone brightly… because the sun shone brightly almost always… and then there were those rainy days and nights that stand out in your mind because they were just special somehow… and so I sit here at my workstation and watch the rain streaming down the window… and it takes me back to those rainy days eons ago in Madras when life was all about sailing a paper boat on a lake that was really a lawn…

Ah rain... don't go away... little me wants to dream...